'Craven spineless worms': GOP-led Ethics Committee slammed for keeping Gaetz report secret

20 November 2024

A report on Attorney General-designate Matt Gaetz will remain under wraps until at least next month, after the latest meeting by the Republican-controlled House Committee on Ethics. Legal experts, political commentators and journalists are all condemning the decision to suppress the report.

On Wednesday afternoon, The Hill reported that the committee — which is evenly divided with both five Republicans and five Democrats — failed to reach a conclusion on whether to release the report to the public. Rep. Michael Guest (R-Miss.), who chairs the committee, would only say there was "not an agreement" between Democrats and Republicans after more than two hours of deliberations. In response to Guest's comment, Rep. Susan Wild (D-Penn.), who is the ranking member of the committee, accused Guest of breaking his own word to not discuss the committee's private deliberations.

"[Guest] has implied that there was an agreement of the committee not to disclose the report," she said. "That is inaccurate."

The next meeting of the Ethics Committee is on December 5, but some are calling on the report to be made public in other ways. Author Lesley Abravenel encouraged anyone with the report to "LEAK THE DAMN THING." Journalist Judd Legum posted to the social media platform Bluesky that "the Senate should just redo the investigation publicly during the confirmation hearing."

"Recall every witness," Legum wrote. "Get it all out there."

The New York Times confirmed that the committee's vote on whether to release the report was "deadlocked" on party lines. Iraq War veteran and podcaster Fred Wellman opined that the term "deadlocked" was a misnomer.

"They 'deadlocked' because the Republicans are such craven spineless worms they want to cover it up now," Wellman wrote on Bluesky.

Former Jezebel editor-in-chief Laura Bassett contrasted the committee's decision to continue sitting on the report with House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-La.) recent decision to force Congresswoman-elect Sarah McBride (D-Del.) to use the men's bathroom. Bassett sarcastically wrote: "Love to ban trans women from capitol restrooms in order to 'protect women and girls' while suppressing a report about the incoming attorney general [allegedly] paying for the statutory rape of a minor while in congress and showing women’s nudes on the House floor."

Gaetz resigned from Congress shortly after President-elect Donald Trump nominated him to head the Department of Justice. While this was ostensibly done to streamline the special election process to fill his seat, Politico reported that another theory is that Gaetz's resignation was a strategic way of suppressing the report, as the Ethics Committee would no longer have jurisdiction over him. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based attorney Max Kennerly suggested that the reason the report has still not yet been made public is due to potentially damning details within.

"My professional legal opinion of this is 'wow he must be super-duper guilty, just the guiltiest dude ever, a mountain of incontrovertible evidence all pointing to his guilt,'" Kennerly wrote.

While the report itself remains hidden from the public, some details have already emerged. This includes Venmo records of Gaetz sending more than $10,000 to two women who testified before the committee earlier this year. The Florida Republican is accused of having sex with a girl who was 17 years old at the time, and of using illegal drugs. The DOJ declined to formally charge Gaetz in 2023 after investigating him for alleged sex trafficking of minors.

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